New Delhi, Feb. 1 -- India is planning to merge existing state-owned oil and gas companies to form a global entity that would be able to compete with the world's largest energy companies, finance minister Arun Jaitley said in his budget speech on Wednesday.
Jaitley reiterated a proposal made in July 2016 to merge 13 state-run oil companies to create a giant corporation with a market value bigger than Russia's Rosneft and India's Reliance Industries Ltd.
The companies included Oil and Natural Gas Corporation Ltd (ONGC), Indian Oil Corporation Ltd (IOC), Bharat Petroleum Corp. Ltd (BPCL), Hindustan Petroleum Corp. Ltd (HPCL), GAIL (India) Ltd, Mangalore Refinery and Petrochemicals Ltd, Chennai Petroleum Corp. Ltd, Numaligarh Refinery Ltd, and Oil India Ltd.
The cabinet secretariat referred the proposal last year to the oil ministry.
In August 2016, oil minister Dharmendra Pradhan said: "It is an idea which was reportedly mooted by a director of a state-owned company and, like all ideas, have to be debated; we are debating it."
A similar proposal was considered more than a decade ago, but was set aside when a committee that studied the matter said such a merger may not be feasible.